


The Salt Of Your Eyes

by moonix



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: FIx It, M/M, Raphael is a poetic disaster, Sorry Not Sorry, casual crying, colleagues with benefits to lovers, i just want the gays to be happy, survivory, ~poetic descriptions of seasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 22:46:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5983210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Raphael cries a lot but still manages to accidentally domesticate Ivory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Salt Of Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure about any content warnings this time, but I suppose it can't hurt to say that there is some sadness and angst surrounding the final battle and a bit of PTSD and survivor's guilt and all that. I promise it has a happy ending though. Also, Raphael cries a lot, but it's casual.

1

Raphael shakes the water from his hair and enters the building. February has been slowly melting into spring, a steady drip of days, the icy rush of sunlight early in the year, but the nights are still cold, even if the rain feels like silk on his neck. The bar room is crowded, the air stifling and thick, the stale scent of sour mulled wine still squats amid the tables. Fat candles are simmering down the night on the window sills. Raphael fiddles with his scarf and steps around a cluster of men, only just manages to stumble out of range when a chair topples backward, then snaps back with a bang. Its shrieking inhabitant looks at him with kohl-rimmed upside-down eyes, grins, winks.

“Can't I interest you in a drink, love?” the voice flits after him like a colourful insect, aflutter with charm, but Raphael shakes his head and makes his way on to the bar to buy his own choice of poison tonight. The noise of conversation settles indifferently around him like a shrug, and he is grateful. He's exchanged his blue airman coat for his old one, the one he came to the city with, threadbare and scuffed as it is – if it was good enough for Natalia, it will be good enough for these men. It still smells like leather and hay and home, a little bit.

Before he quite reaches the bar, he stops again, feet faltering so suddenly he nearly falls. A man has been watching his progress across the room, limbs loosely arranged against a wooden beam, no drink in his hands. He has hair like a wisp of breath in cold air and eyes the warm grey of steam curling up from a cup of tea, and Raphael has been dreaming about him, mouthing reverent verse upon waking, both craving and dreading his attention, and now he is here, and Raphael is pinned in his gaze like a butterfly under staples.

He opens his mouth to say a name, but is cut off by a soft inclination of the head. Left with no other choice, Raphael follows him outside again, sweat licking down his sternum and staining his shirt under the partly undone row of buttons on his jacket. At last, when they step into the stark cold alley outside the building, Raphael permits himself to sigh his name: “Ivory,” and then a faltering “I.”

Ivory's taut body turns around to face him, moonlight drizzled down his front. The rain has stopped, but the air still tastes damp and mildewy, a clammy weight on Raphael's tongue. Ivory leans his head to the side, one hand in his pocket. He doesn't usually keep his knives in such obvious places, but Raphael's feet still want to move back, and he jumps when his back meets the wall with a dull thud.

“So,” Ivory says, mouth pulled up at one side. He scuffs a steel-toed boot against the cobblestones and it rings out like a dropped coin in the silence of the alley. “Not just my dragon, then, that chose a cindy for her rider.”

He grins. It looks feral in the dark, but there is humour in it as well. Raphael squares his shoulders and dares hope.

“Nothing in the call for audition that states you can't be,” he points out levelly, and Ivory's lips soften into a curious little smile.

“No, I suppose not,” he agrees. “What will you choose, I wonder?”

“Choose?” Raphael asks. Ivory holds up two fingers.

“One,” he murmurs, “we walk away from this place and forget. We don't talk about it. We don't acknowledge it. We never come here again, and find other places, and other, less savoury options for spending our nights with. Two...” He crooks the remaining finger, beckoning like an invitation.

“Two?” Raphael hardly breathes.

“We make use of this fortuitous coincidence, and fuck each other instead.”

The silence chimes like Ivory's boot on the pavement, and Raphael has to remind his knees that they are supposed to hold him up. His stomach, too, is in danger of failing him, but somehow, he stays upright, the ridges of his shoulder blades digging painfully into the wall behind him. There is a small tattoo of a writing quill tucked between them, done by his brother on the night before Raphael left for Thremedon. The thought of it drives posture back into his spine.

“How?”

Ivory laughs, a tiny sound of delight, and finally pulls his hand out of his trouser pocket, spreading both sets of fingers out in front of him, empty-handed. His palms are wide and sturdy, his nails chewed down to the skin; they don't look much like a pianist's hands, and yet the music they coax out of the old instrument up at the Airman has made Raphael cry himself to sleep with beauty.

Granted, he does that a lot.

“However you prefer it,” Ivory says now, stepping closer. The gentle steam of their breaths mingles between their faces. He speaks slowly: “You can fuck me. I can fuck you. Hands, mouths – I'm not picky. As for the question of _where_ , there is an attic room at the Airman which stores surplus furniture. They must have thought there'd be more of us in the early days...”

Raphael breathes out. He wants it, all of it, so much that his arms hurt and his fingertips buzz like live bees, and it takes his mouth several tries to shape itself into an answer, but when he finally says it, Ivory smiles, nods, and holds out his hand.

 

2

Ivory picks the lock on the attic room door and leads them inside. It is late, now, and their footsteps are muffled by the sound of the rain picking back up outside. All weather is noisier from inside the Airman building: rain strikes the tin window sills like pebbles skipping off into the night, wind howls with the raid sirens and screeches along the building's sharp edges, ice cracks like dragon metal, sunlight makes everything groan. Ivory opens a window, sticks his face out into the gale. The room smells like old tea and unused wood furniture, some of which has been arranged into a neat little corner separated from the room by a folding screen painted with clouds. There is a bed, freshly made up in moss green sheets, a cupboard, a large square porcelain sink mounted on the wall. Raphael finds a lamp and lights it carefully, making shadows boil up along the wall. After a moment, Ivory closes the window again and walks over to the cupboard, finds two folded towels that he throws over the top of the folding screen, then begins to unbutton his coat.

“I sleep here sometimes,” he explains, “when I have headaches.”

Raphael watches him take off his coat, his boots, and one by one, the rest of his clothes, until he stands naked in front of the bed. Then Ivory steps over to the sink and washes his hands, meticulously, with soap that smells like bergamot.

“Raphael,” he says when he's finished drying his hands on one of the towels. “Take off your clothes.”

So Raphael does. He washes his hands, too, in case that's something Ivory cares about, and dries them on the other towel, then sits awkwardly on the edge of the bed. It's not that he hasn't done this before – he just hasn't done it with Ivory.

“You look like you expect me to hurt you,” Ivory chides. He takes Raphael's chin in his hand, but doesn't force him to look up. Raphael's eyes flicker upward anyway.

“Won't you?” he asks, more curious than scared. Ivory shakes his head.

“Whatever you like, that's what I'll do,” Ivory says softly, palm still cupped under Raphael's jaw.

Raphael can't help it, he blurts out “kissing,” because that is a thing he likes, and a thing he would like Ivory to do, and maybe he is asking too much, but Ivory just moves his hand around to cradle his head instead, gently gripping his hair, and leans down to oblige. His mouth doesn't feel momentously different from any other mouth Raphael's kissed before him, and for a moment, it is just a kiss, but then Ivory fits his other hand around the globe of Raphael's shoulder, smoothing one rough thumb over soft skin, and something inside Raphael trembles and rhymes.

Ivory climbs over him and tries kissing his chest next, sucking and mouthing over his nipples, and Raphael discovers in turn just how easily Ivory's pale skin bruises under his lips. He is careful not to mark him in places that are too visible, though Ivory has no such qualms about him, and Raphael doesn't care, digs his fingertips into Ivory's hips and nibbles along his collarbone until Ivory squirms off his lap again and stands in front of him, breathing heavily, looking down on him. Slowly, Raphael slides off the bed and onto his knees.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Okay,” Ivory says, and Raphael takes him in his mouth, and Ivory tightens his fingers in Raphael's curls.

 

3

When Raphael is done sucking him off, he wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and gets up off his aching knees to sit on the bed. Ivory lifts a hand to his own face, slides a stray wisp of hair behind his ear. His breathing is still going fast.

“You swallowed,” he says, almost an accusation. “Aren't you afraid of catching something?”

“You ride Cassiopeia,” Raphael points out. “She won't even let the handlers touch her without gloves. Can't imagine she'd let you anywhere near her if you had something to catch.”

“Dragons can't catch human diseases,” Ivory frowns.

“And yet she nearly burned down the pens that time Luvander sneezed in her direction,” Raphael says softly, and Ivory's mouth turns smug despite himself.

“Your turn,” he says, pushing him onto his back.

By the time he is finished with Raphael, he is three fingers deep, has him gripping the edge of the bed with both hands for support, and watches, pleased and serene, with his cheek on Raphael's thigh, as Raphael comes over his hand and his own stomach with a wrung-out mewl. Raphael just about managed to warn him in time and Ivory duly removed his mouth and replaced it with his palm. Now, he pulls out his fingers with a soft squelchy sound that makes him grin, rocks back on his heels, and gets up to wash his hands and face over the sink. Raphael doesn't quite trust his legs enough to do the same, and there is that horribly familiar lurching sensation somewhere in his chest, that tightening of his throat, warning of impending tears; it wouldn't be the first time he's cried right after sex, but it would possibly be the most humiliating of those instances, and Raphael swallows thickly and tries to shove the feeling down to the bottoms of his lungs, bottle it up safely in the myriad tiny vials of his bronchi so it becomes less overwhelming as a whole.

He fails.

When Ivory comes back from the sink with a wet flannel and a round flat pebble of a hum in his mouth, Raphael is curled up on his side, face awkwardly squashed into the bunched-up sheets, hoping against hope that Ivory won't notice. He hisses when the cold flannel sneaks up under his elbow to clean up the dribble of come on his belly, then, folded once, dips briefly between his legs to wipe away excess lube. The mattress moves and Ivory's steps fade, water runs, Raphael grits his teeth and pushes his face hard against the sheets, then Ivory is back with a cool hand on his shoulder and an offer of a chipped green mug filled with water.

“Drink,” he nudges, “coming and crying is hard work. I didn't hurt you, did I?”

Raphael trembles, but manages to shake his head and take the cup from him. When he's done, Ivory fetches him a blanket from the cupboard, a big woolly grey one that smells clean and homely, and Raphael sits up and slouches against the headboard, hands cupped around the empty mug.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, aware of the wetness still trailing from his eyes and nose, though the worst of the urge has passed. “It's not – you. Just happens sometimes when...”

He waves his hand, and Ivory catches it. He's grinning, but not in a malicious way.

“When things get intense?” he teases, and Raphael's upper lip twitches against his will. He can feel the beginnings of heat in his cheeks.

“Fuck off,” he says weakly. “Who knew you were so nice when caught on your own?”

“How about this, I won't make any jokes about wet orgasms in front of the others,” Ivory promises solemnly, “if you don't mention my secret niceness. Deal?”

Raphael laughs wetly and rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands, then says: “You know what this place needs? Some tea-making equipment.”

“I knew you were a good addition to my sheets,” Ivory says softly, eyes roaming down Raphael's naked body, then flicking back up to his face to make sure he saw. “I prefer loose-leaf, green, from that market stall by the fountain, the one with the amulets and those tiny teapots. I'll never understand why they make teapots that tiny, they hold less than a mug.”

Raphael doesn't understand either, but the next morning, long after he and Ivory have sneaked back to their respective bedrooms, and the rain has fizzled itself out on the cobblestones outside, Raphael puts on his coat and goes to the market to buy three packets of loose-leaf green tea, a dented second-hand kettle, a chipped yellow mug, and a proper teapot with something that looks like shimmery scales painted on the outside.

They break it all in three nights later, after Ivory has fucked Raphael on his hands and knees until they are too shaky to hold him upright anymore, and Raphael cries a bit while Ivory charms the fireplace to life again with deft hands.

“You know what this place needs?” Raphael says into the tea steam silence, lulled half to sleep by the warmth of the fire.

“What now?”

“Something to toast.”

 

4

It goes like this: they get ready. They go out. They come back once the others have cleared the building, sneak up the back stairs that no one else uses because the front ones have banisters you can slide down, and wait for each other in the attic. Sometimes, Raphael brings a book if he's early. Then Ivory fucks him, as long and as hard as Raphael can stand, usually on the bed, occasionally on the floor if Raphael's been waiting long, and after, Ivory cleans them up and makes tea while Raphael flushes the last surge of emotions out of his system with tears and tries to stay awake long enough to return to his own bedroom.

They toast bread and marshmallows and fruit over the fire. They listen to the sound of the rain. Ivory asks him to read something from his book, so Raphael opens it at random and recites a poem about cats while Ivory stretches and reclines on the bed and looks feline and smug. Ghislain comments on how often Raphael is getting laid these days, has he got a lady friend? Ivory says something rude about ladies not wanting soppy romantic poets, Magoughin says “don't, you'll make him cry,” and Ivory breaks his own promise and grins feral and hungry and says, softly, “I do so enjoy making him cry, though.”

Raphael is instantly rock hard.

Half of his things have migrated from his bedroom to the attic. Ivory buys a new lock for the door, just in case. By the time spring rains melt into perfumed summer haze, their tea stash includes not just Ivory's favourite green, but also a smoky dark black and several fancy blends, including a peppermint chai that Ivory only drinks when he wants Raphael over the armchair they seem to have acquired at some point.

Raphael stops hiding his bruised knees and the bite marks on his shoulders in the showers, rumours about his lady friend are rampant and offensive, but Ivory only smirks and trails careful scents of bergamot soap and peppermint chai down corridors. Raphael is loud. Ivory encourages that. They change their set of sheets for lighter ones, leave the window open, fall asleep together. Raphael is amazed Cassiopeia hasn't bucked Ivory off her back yet for all the filth they get up to at night, and Natalia scolds him for having dirty thoughts in mid-air.

“Why would anyone buy one of these,” Ivory says at the market, picking up a miniature iron teapot and turning it over and over in his hands with a sullen look on his face like the muggy heat that's churning in the streets. Raphael feels a shiver of sweat on his back and plucks the teapot out of Ivory's hands.

“I don't know,” Raphael says, “let's find out.”

Ivory pulls faces at the thing, but Raphael hides a smile when it ends up pride of place on the mantelpiece in the attic, never used for actual tea brewing, but never allowed to accumulate dust either.

The war is quiet.

Ivory plays piano and Raphael hangs around the common room, pretending to read. Once, on a scorching hot summer afternoon, all oxygen burned out of the stagnant air inside the Airman building, Raphael and Ivory manage to be the first ones to obtain permission from a heat-struck Adamo to take their restless dragons out for a spin. He even forgets to set them a time limit. Ghislain, naked and spread-eagled on the cool kitchen floor, looks at them like they've both grown extra heads as Raphael assembles some quick sandwiches and Ivory palms apples into his bag. They step over his prone limbs and pass Luvander, upside-down in an armchair fanning himself limply, and Rook, whose shirtless chest is still glistening with water from his third cold shower. No one has enough energy to care where they are going.

The fresh air whipping around them is exhilarating, but Raphael wishes their flight goggles came with tinted glasses, because the sun is painful and merciless. They leave Thremedon and its ugly smock of stifling heat behind, let Cassiopeia and Natalia brush tree tops and race each other over open fields, and when the sun is just starting to droop at last, Ivory steers them over to the rocky shore of a small, deserted lake. There, they leave their flight gear tucked under Natalia's wing and plunge into the cool relief of the water to wash off the soot and sweat, and Raphael floats on his back and counts clouds while Ivory swims to the other shore and back.

“If th'Esar knew we were taking the girls out for picnics...” Raphael says once they're both spread out to dry in the grass, biting into the crisp skin of an apple. Its juices boil over and run down his chin, and he sucks on the sweet flesh as Ivory flicks the crust of his sandwich into the bushes. Ivory will eat almost anything, but he is always fussy about unexpected things: sandwich crusts, grape seeds, peach skins, fish bones, the raisins in Evariste's porridge. Raphael is used to hearty, traditional farm fare and wary of the capital's exotic food fads, but he eats his apples whole, core and all.

“The Esar doesn't know shit,” Ivory says, eyes narrowed. “He might think he owns those dragons...”

“What, like he doesn't?” Raphael snorts, surprised.

“No,” Ivory snaps. He twists around to look at their girls asleep in the shade of a rock, mosquitoes swarming around them in the warm air radiating off their scales. Quietly, he adds: “They don't belong to any man, Esar or Mollyrat crook.”

Raphael doesn't say anything. He tries not to think about what's going to happen when they win the war. After all, weapons are still weapons in peace time, and dragons aren't meant to be cooped up in buildings and attend summer picnics. Not winning the war is even more inconceivable, so Raphael swallows the last stringy bites of his apple and closes his eyes, arms stretched above his head. He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knows is Ivory coming out of the water again, cool and dripping and kneeling over him to kiss and bite a wet path down his chest.

Cassiopeia and Natalia haven't moved, and Raphael can pretend they're alone when Ivory starts sucking him off. He brings him close to the edge, then withdraws to fetch a condom and a small jar of lube he must have sneaked into the picnic bag when Raphael wasn't looking.

“Okay?” he asks, but Raphael is already getting on his hands and knees, grass sticking to the backs of his thighs and his hair in an unruly halo around his head. Ivory prepares him quickly, then fucks him slowly in the gold syrupy light of the sunset, bent low over him, mouth pursed gently over his left shoulder as Raphael squirms and gasps and tries, and fails, to be quiet.

Afterwards, they dip into the lake one more time to clean up, Raphael's tears making the sweet water just the slightest bit saltier, and when they've dried in a last pool of hot melting sunlight on the rocks, they wake their dragons and fly home.

It's worth the telling off they get from the chief sergeant when they touch down in the pens again, and the smirk Natalia gives Raphael on his way out.

She has some interesting new pet names for him from then on, which Raphael pretends not to understand, though his pink ears betray him every time.

 

5

“Don't you ever want to top?”

Summer's edges are just curling into autumn, which starts with rosy burnished copper days and brisk, chilly nights. Raphael is washing his face over the sink in the attic, and Ivory has made tea with some milk they brought up from the kitchen. There's an open tin of biscuits on the table in front of the fireplace and a light patchwork blanket made by Raphael's mum draped casually over the armchair for Raphael to wrap around his shoulders when he's done crying.

“I,” Raphael says now, surprised, “I've never thought about it.”

“Fair enough,” Ivory shrugs, “you can, though, if you want.”

He sounds casual enough, and Raphael says “ok” and lets the matter drop. For a while after that, they go back to sleeping in their own beds, because the raids start back up and they don't want to draw attention to the fact that they haven't been using their bedrooms much lately. Raphael's bed feels cold and too big, and he finds himself half-awake at times listening for the intricate pattern of Ivory's breaths beside him despite knowing he's not there.

The next time they meet in the attic, they're both freshly out of the shower after a raid, and Ivory is wired and taut under Raphael's hands. Raphael tries to be gentle, but Ivory keeps pushing back and only starts to warm up when Raphael grabs his arse cheeks with both hands and picks him up to carry him over to the bed with Ivory's legs slung about his waist.

“Can I, tonight,” Raphael asks, “do you want me to?”

Ivory presses the lube into his hand with an untidy sigh and pulls him back down into their kiss.

Like with food, Ivory isn't picky about what he does in bed, but he has very specific demands about how they do it. He is fine with two fingers, but not three; he doesn't like having his nipples touched and he wants to ride Raphael and he only lets Raphael wrap a hand around his cock when he's close to finishing. As always, he is quiet, and Raphael is loud. He hasn't missed doing it this way around until they are doing it this way around, and he makes himself wait until Ivory has come before sliding out and getting himself off the rest of the way with Ivory's head on his shoulder catching his breath.

He thinks maybe he won't cry this time, but then it sneaks up on him anyway, because Ivory is sleepy and trembling in his arms, and Raphael's forgotten about the classic post-raid crash that not even Rook is immune to sometimes, though he deals with it in other, less watery ways than Raphael.

Ivory reaches up tiredly to stroke his face and hums a lullaby under his breath.

They don't have sex for a few weeks after that, because Ivory doesn't feel like it. Raphael is worried, but they don't stop meeting in the attic whenever they can get away with it, and Ivory only laughs and tells him to stop fretting. Raphael makes strong spiced cider over the fireplace, buys new books and learns new poems in the theatre district, Ivory brings caramel apples from the market dipped in white chocolate and chopped walnuts and feeds Raphael slices while October rainstorms press their hailstone noses against the window panes outside. Somehow – and Raphael won't name names here, but he is definitely not the one who brought it in – they acquire a cat. No one is more surprised than Cassiopeia herself when the cat leaps up onto her wing joint and lives, and they only narrowly avoid a blood bath when Merritt accidentally befriends it in the common room and Ivory seethes with jealousy and knives until Raphael, quietly, points out that Ivory is still the only one allowed to pick the cat up and carry it around.

In November, they start fucking again, and Ivory asks Raphael to read out a letter from home because he has trouble deciphering some of it.

“I can't,” Raphael admits sadly, curling his hands into his belly and sinking lower in his chair. “I'm sorry.”

“But you read books all the time...” Ivory says, a small, confused frown clipped between his brows. Raphael swallows down a prickle of shame with the dryness in his mouth and smooths his fingers over the parchment of Ivory's letter before handing it back.

“I don't, actually,” he says, a ruthless downwards tug in the corner of his mouth. He mustn't cry, now. This isn't the time. “I just... like looking at them, and holding them, and turning the pages, and remembering the poems I know.”

“Oh,” Ivory says and blinks a few times in quick succession. “Oh, I see. Why didn't you say?”

Raphael presses his lips together and swallows again. “'Cause that's – well. My role? I guess? For the others, I'm the soppy idiot poet, and what good's a poet that can't read?”

“Plenty good,” Ivory grins, “for one thing, you're still a soppy idiot, and that's more than enough for a good joke or two.”

“Tit,” Raphael grumbles and pokes him with his toe until Ivory swats him away.

“What's that you just said, _Hey Ivory, let's not ever have sex anymore_? Because that's definitely what I heard.”

Raphael, of course, has to clear up that misunderstanding immediately.

The first snow has Ivory clenched up like a fist on the bed with a headache so severe it makes him throw up twice. Raphael cleans up the mess, hangs makeshift curtains over the window, makes sure he gets some food and liquids into Ivory and sleeps in an armchair near the bed, because Ivory needs space, but Raphael is loathe to leave him alone despite his protests of having survived worse on his own. The next day, Ivory is pale, shaky and weak, but most of the pain has passed, and Raphael opens the window a bit for some fresh air and tip-toes downstairs to get clean towels and some breakfast. He gets cornered in the kitchen by Balfour, who looks like he's spent the night camped at the kitchen table with a book, empty cups littered about him and wispy dark circles under his eyes.

“No citrus, no dairy,” Balfour tells him idly without looking up from his book as Raphael stares into the pantry, trying to find something that won't upset Ivory's stomach today. “My mother gets them, too. She usually just sticks to toast for a while after.”

Raphael turns around and tries to remember if he told the others last night that Ivory was having a headache and that he was looking after him. His mind is blank. Slightly unsettled, he pulls out a loaf of sour dough bread and cuts off a few slices, then picks up some eggs and the basket of apples on the counter.

“What about these?” he asks, and Balfour glances at them and shrugs.

“Ask him. Can't hurt to try.”

Raphael slices more bread, toasts and butters it, boils half a dozen eggs, cuts apples into neat wedges. When he's done, he plops a plate with food and a mug of hot tea in front of Balfour, who startles and blinks.

“Thanks -”

“How did you know that I was making him breakfast?” Raphael blurts out, still unnerved by Balfour's kind advice on headache foods. Balfour's mouth twitches to the side and he picks up an egg, cracks it smartly against the side of his plate. Steam issues from the cooked insides when he starts to peel away the shell.

“You're fucking,” he states, and it isn't a question; it's not even an answer to what Raphael wanted to know. Raphael holds his breath and says nothing. Balfour bites delicately into his egg and shrugs. He's almost finished with his book. “I'm not going to tell the others,” he says with a scrunch of his nose, “though to be honest, I'm not sure if they don't already know.”

Raphael takes his carefully laid breakfast tray and leaves, heartbeat clogging his throat. The cutlery rattles as he carries it upstairs. When he returns, Ivory is sitting up in bed, the cat knotted up tight in his lap, Raphael's cardigan slung over his shoulders. Raphael sets down the tray and closes the window again, stokes the fire, makes them tea.

“Balfour knows that we're...”

Ivory looks up from where he's nibbling on a piece of toast. “Yes, he would,” he says, unfazed, “little shit sees everything, doesn't he?”

Raphael swallows and sits crouched in front of the fire, waiting for the water to boil. He feels like crying, but he doesn't know why, and then the kettle boils over because he hasn't been paying attention and he burns himself on the hot metal as he hastily tries to get it out of the fire. Before he knows it, swearwords curl up from his mouth like steam, then condensate into tears on his cheeks, dripping back down his chin.

There is a heavy thump as the cat lands on the floor with an unimpressed mewl, then a few shuffling steps, then Ivory is wrapping a blanket and himself around him from behind, arms linked in front of Raphael's chest and face tucked between his shoulder blades where the tattoo is hiding under Raphael's crumpled shirt.

“My little crybaby,” he whispers, and Raphael wraps his hands around Ivory's skinny wrists and sobs.

 

6

And then the war.

Raids get longer and more frequent, the nightly routine of snow storms and violence numbs and wears down everyone's spirits like elbow patches. Something happens on one of them that brings Ivory back shaking and mute, still damp from his shower as he slips into the attic room where Raphael has been waiting up. Raphael spends the snow-flecked dawn providing a solid barrier between Ivory and the rest of the world, wrapped around him on the floor next to the bed, on the rag rug he's picked up from the market a few weeks ago, from which Ivory proceeds to pull out half the threads before he finally falls asleep at daybreak, exhausted and pale, fingers sore.

Months go by. A lull in the fighting sends them a chaperone and invitations to a ball at the palace, and Raphael hurts just looking at Ivory in his sleek uniform, knowing he is not allowed to touch tonight. He half-heartedly agrees to a few dances, then escapes to a bathroom where he is sucked into a conversation about third-edition gold prints with a Margrave's assistant fresh in from the country. Homesickness roils in his guts. At the end of the night, Ivory is waiting for him by a carriage, hands in his pockets and hair ruffling in the breeze, a minuscule smile stamped into the shape of his lips.

“Shall we go home?” he asks softly, and Raphael forgets about country summers and family dinners and gets in the carriage beside him, feeling flushed and warm once more. In the attic, Ivory fucks him on the bed, Raphael naked and Ivory still in uniform, hands tucked into the backs of Raphael's knees, the noises heavy and wet in the fluttery silence of the room. Somehow, Ivory manages to keep his uniform spotless, except for a smudge of Raphael's post-coital tears on the lapel that quickly dries.

Then their dragons start fraying at the edges, and they're both too preoccupied and busy to meet in the attic much, let alone have sex. Raphael spends nights sleeping in Natalia's pen, Ivory signs up for more raids to vent his frustration. When it becomes clear what they will have to do, that they might all die in a final blaze of glory over Lapis, an unusual quiet falls over the Airman. Raphael runs his hand over the spines of his books, then goes up to the attic under the pretence of making sure they let the cat out earlier. Ivory is standing in front of the window, flight gear on, goggles pushed up into his hair, turning the little iron teapot over and over in his hands.

“Promise that whatever happens to us, will happen to both of us,” he says when Raphael joins him, a narrow sliver of desperation in his otherwise flat voice. “Promise that if we don't both live, then at least we'll both die.”

Raphael can't speak, so he reels Ivory in for a clinging embrace, and seals the promise with tears instead.

In the end, he's not sure which of them breaks the promise.

For the longest time after the battle of Lapis, Raphael keeps himself alive for the possibility that Ivory is also still alive out there, and when Ghislain shows up to take him home and shakes his head at the questioning look in Raphael's eyes, it is only Ghislain's unwavering determination to keep him fed and hydrated and warm that does the job. Their little adventure in the tunnels under the palace, the emergence of the new dragons, and the fact that there are people who need Raphael to stay all contribute to help him get out of bed in the mornings, and he forces himself to re-learn all the other reasons for going on, even the smallest, most feeble ones, like the fact that he never found out how that one poem ends that has been stuck in his head ever since before the battle.

He finds someone at the Versity who agrees to patiently teach him to read two nights a week, and he has tea with Luvander on Sundays, and goes to the market with Balfour for lunch when the weather permits. Ghislain goes back to sea. Adamo checks in every day. Raphael stays three weeks with his family and heals, a little bit every day, until he can face the city again.

He gets another tattoo – a single musical note dripping out of the end of his old quill. He doesn't cry. If his pillow is wet, it's because the scar on his mouth pulls at his lip like a fish hook and makes him drool in his sleep, and in the morning he feels parched, sore, bleary-eyed and ugly, and he makes a pot of Ivory's favourite green tea and toasts himself a raisin bun and sits out in the polished spring sunshine with his breakfast and his grief.

“Of course we knew,” Luvander tells him kindly one stormy afternoon over crumpets and coffee, leaning forward on his rickety kitchen table so he can catch Raphael's lowered gaze. “It was kind of hard to miss, the way you were always together, even if you were at opposite ends of a room.”

Raphael finds this comforting – he can believe they still are, even if they are at opposite ends of life now.

“Anyways,” says Luvander smugly, picking up his coffee cup, “I heard you one time. It sounded – _intense_.”

He grins and dodges as Raphael tosses a sugar cube at him. It hits the newest horrible mask on Luvander's wall instead, and for a week, Raphael is terrified he's brought bad luck on himself as he breaks quills and drops saucers and ruins his shoes climbing a rock on one of his walks, but Luvander only laughs and points out he's always been clumsy and disastrous.

The day when Ghislain's ship puts in at the harbour after long weeks of absence without word and Luvander biting his nails to stubs, Raphael has brought Balfour and Adamo round to the hat shop for a game of cards and some wine. Luvander has just put the kettle on and nearly drops a jug of cream when someone unlocks the downstairs door – Ghislain has a key now, on Luvander's insistence – and heavy steps clunk up the stairs, followed by a lighter tread.

“Do you think -” Luvander asks weakly, putting voice to the sudden tense hope that has petrified the room. Raphael swallows. Adamo is shaking his head over and over again. Balfour folds his hands in his lap.

Ghislain opens the door, sees the assembly of former airmen poised over their cards and their booze, and grins. “Honey, I'm home,” he grunts, “brought you a present, to apologise for the long absence and all.”

He reaches behind him to pull Ivory into the room by the scruff of his neck like an antsy kitten, and Raphael falls off his chair in a flurry of cards and coins.

He hits his knee hard, making tears shoot to his eyes, but the pain instantly spreads, and before he can stop it, he's thrown himself at Ivory with a wail, sobbing his heart out, while Adamo shouts curses and Luvander does break the cream jug and Balfour accidentally dents Luvander's table banging his fist on it. All Raphael cares about are Ivory's arms safely around him, and his around Ivory, and he doesn't think he's ever cried so much in his life, but there's a first time for everything, after all.

“Mmm,” Ivory hums, cupping one hand around the back of Raphael's head and winding his fingers into his curls. His other palm rests over the place where Raphael's tattoo is, leaking spidery warmth into his back. “Hello there. I do so enjoy making you cry.”

Raphael sobs and laughs and holds on.


End file.
